Familial Rejection
by Yaji's Girl
Summary: Ranfan learns that to move on, she must first reject those that rejected her.


**This is my fourth draft for this particular story. The first one was the closest to this particular idea, in which I had Yamcha to get Ranfan to talk of her past. That one got scratched because there were too many characters. In the second, a fifteen-year-old Ranfan ran from her parents to take a modeling job, where a nineteen-year-old Violet lived pre-Red Ribbon Army, and the two talked over her rejection. That one was deleted when I stupidly didn't save after 5,000 words written, and my computer restarted last night. The third one focused more on Violet and her life in the base, but that one focused too much on a snobby General Blue and, overall, it would have become too long.**

**And so, for Esplandian and J.W. Appel, here is how I connect Violet, Ranfan, and Fanfan. It's not chat-focused like all of my other attempts, though I hope you enjoy it. Honestly, the hardest character here was Ranfan, because she's the most developed of the three in the series. It wasn't until I began writing that I realized, 'Wow, Ranfan actually does have a lot of emotion! She's fairly developed for only having starred in half an episode.' **

**But I digress. I hope you enjoy this piece - it's easily the most challenging prompt I've ever been given, which is odd, considering it doesn't even seem that it would be that difficult. Sorry for this rant, and I'll shush now so you can get on reading.  
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There was no denying that, even as coarse and vulgar as she may have been as a woman, Ranfan was a delicate girl. At twenty-eight years of age, while leaning against a wall nonchalantly at the twenty-first Budokai Tenkaichi, she watched the others in the preliminary rounds tussle as she awaited her own turn. She chewed her gum and allowed her eyes to drift from battle to battle, man to man, and kept her face vacant of expression. A slight surprise would flicker in her glazed, green eyes whenever she witnessed an unexpected victory, though that light would die away before it could spark and catch hold of wall she had built around herself, determined to stay away from trouble.

She would rake her thin fingers through her tufted, lilac-colored hair, giving an occasional wink to any man who dared gaze at her concupiscent beauty for longer than he had meant to. It gave her satisfaction to see these large, proud men turn away in an abashed manner with their hands over their faces for having been caught, though that satisfaction was not enough to bring a smile upon her face. Her ossified visage remained as it was, blank with her rosebud lips pursed in anticipation.

Soon, she would be given a chance to prove herself by reaching limits that nasty Crane Hermit had promised she would never reach. Her childhood had been filled with constant bashing for her failures, and for some mysterious reason, she felt that hollow feeling bloom in her bosom when she managed to catch eye contact with another man, one far older than herself. His dark eyes glinted as they passed over her body, though he seemed unfazed as he turned to two younger boys. Ranfan, however, wasn't so unaffected.

Those dark eyes felt familiar, though instead of the cold she recalled them possessing, they were filled with a curious warmth. His pale skin was papery with his age, and the wispy beard around the lower half of his face did little to disguise his lower lip protruding gravely. His light blue hair bounced slightly as a breeze passed through the opening, and as she watched his profile, she noticed his crooked nose fill with a whiff of this fresh air. Her legs tingled as she listened to his rickety voice over the din of the crowd, and she immediately folded her arms across her chest in a protective manner. There was something too familiar about this man, and it was this something that brought her back to her horrid childhood.

She restrained herself of emotion once again, closing her eyes and breathing gently. The old man's face seemed too familiar to be just a coincidence, as she was certain she had seen it before, though she couldn't imagine where. She had never seen a face this ancient, save for that of her Grandfather Shen, which she called that horrible Crane Hermit as there were too many 'great's to be used before the title. This particular man had taken her in at her parents' urging, as they had wanted her to embrace her martial arts heritage. As it was, she couldn't even be certain of whether or not Shen truly was her grandfather, what with rumors that her ancestor Fanfan had slept with his enemy, the acclaimed Turtle Hermit.

But he was still considered to be family, all the same. The retired Turtle Hermit had gone so far to live up to his name that it was said he inhabited a lonely island in the middle of the ocean, whereas the Crane Hermit still took students from time to time. It had been to her fortune that Ranfan's cousin Fanfan, named after the ancestor who had once dated Grandfather Shen, had also decided to take lessons from him in a similar attempt to connect to her past, though this proved to be of little solace in all reality. It only provided another chance for Ranfan to fade in comparison, evanescent as the fleeting sun's rays each night.

At first, the training had been bearable. Fanfan was only two years older than her and had not been there long, only having little experience to go upon. But, unlike Ranfan, Fanfan proved to be exceptionally gifted and a natural born fighter. She managed to glide through the steps in a way that suggested she was indeed the Crane Master's descendent, and an unrelenting favoritism sprung up within only a month or so. It didn't help Ranfan's case that, along with being a talented martial artist, her cousin apparently looked exactly like the ancestor with whom Grandfather Shen had fallen in love so many centuries before.

Whereas the Crane Hermit spent his quality time with Fanfan and a few other students who were naturals, Ranfan was left behind with those who couldn't prove themselves to train with the one she supposed would have been her uncle. But Mercenary Tao didn't treat her as a real uncle would have, and so using such a noun to describe him left a bitter taste on her tongue. He trained her, though he also beat her and threw her and cursed her in his nearly respectable manner whenever she failed as though it would make up for what she was lacking.

And it never did.

Instead, a hatred had begun to kindle in her heart of the Crane Hermit and his family, and it would only be Fanfan at night who would try to say a few consoling words each night before bed. Fanfan herself had been hardened after years of training underneath the Crane Hermit, but Ranfan would notice a similar, violated expression cross her cousin's face from time-to-time, and it wasn't until Ranfan was fourteen and the elder one sixteen that the reason for Fanfan's unhappiness was revealed.

Apparently, over the two years the cousins had trained together, Grandfather Shen's treatment towards Fanfan had become more than that of a grandfather's. She reminded him so much of her double-crossing ancestor, what with possessing the same name and such a similar appearance, that he had attempted to progress their relationship. And, on this particular day that Fanfan finally explained her sour mood, the Crane Hermit had threatened that, should she not comply to kiss him, she would be forced to leave forever. And so, with little choice, she had packed her bags and escaped in the night.

Ranfan had later learned that her cousin had changed her name to Violet in an attempt to sever all connections from this place, something that she always mistakenly corrected the Crane Hermit on whenever he spitefully brought up her name. And this always brought upon draconian consequences, and sometimes while bruised from her beatings Tao brought upon her, she would be forced to sleep outside in the mud with only the sibilance of the rain to keep her company.

She always formulated plans of escape, just as Violet had, though she was not as cunning as her older cousin had been. She was frightened of being caught and being forced through one of her uncle's merciless punishments, one in which he would knock the air out of her small ribcage for her skullduggery as her Grandfather Shen would stand over her, ridiculing her in front of the others and saying that she would never be anything, not even being worth the dirt underneath their feet. He would give a tired wheeze of laughter and retired for the night, ignoring Ranfan's helpless cries that were lost to her lack of breath, leaving her to be tortured until Tao became bored of it.

It wasn't until she was seventeen that she had begun to doubt the legitimacy of their being related. Perhaps this was all a misunderstanding. Instead of her ancestor Fanfan having had a child with Grandfather Shen, the child had been conceived with the mysterious Turtle Hermit. And so, when not under the suspicious eye of Shen or the ruthless fist of Tao, she sneaked off to a storage room with memories forgotten and spent the day rummaging through it, wondering just whether there was something to prove that she was training with the wrong school after all.

But all she had turned up had been a picture on copy paper with what appeared to be two men, one of whom was holding a pig in his arms. It could not be mistaken, though - one of the men were her very own Grandfather Shen, and the other was the man he despised, both of them wearing dark lenses over their youthful faces.

She left the picture there and vowed to retrieve it when she was a little braver, though that opportunity would never come. Within only a week, she had been kicked out of the training school with complaints of how fruitless efforts of teaching her had been, and of how she would never amount to anything. Now she was free and had considered returning home to her parents to see them for the first time in years, though she realized that she didn't have parents that truly cared for her. It seemed her whole family hated her, all trying to either hand her off to anybody who would take her, abandoning her, or beating her until she bled. And so she took off for East City, prepared to make a decade's worth of money by working in a men's club.

There, her confidence was boosted, through there was still an emptiness that presided in her heart. She was praised for her beauty, regardless of the few scars that remained of her past, and her insecurities vanished over time, the wounds healing themselves. She learned of how to take advantage of an average man, but what could she have done with her old teachers, who may or may not have been related to her? Nothing, she feared.

Then, however, her chance came. A man came in with a flier of the upcoming Budokai Tenkaichi, showing it off to a few of his friends, and Ranfan couldn't help but listen. It was her chance to redeem herself, and with her new-found confidence, she believed herself capable of winning. She had been able to fight at one point in her life on levels that would have exceeded most martial arts schools' standards, and it would only be a matter of practicing to gain her ground once more

After a year's worth of training when she wasn't working, she had finally come, prepared. She had immediately been relieved that the Crane Master and his brother weren't here to deflate her and bombard her with the usual insults, though she wondered vaguely if they would even recognize her anymore. Once, she had been an insecure girl who had been called hideous too many times in her life, and now she was a full-fledged woman with a will to fight. She needed to fight now, and not only to prove the Crane school that they were wrong about her abilities, but also to prove to herself that she was above their criticisms.

Now, she would use the very same techniques she had learned from the wretched school to renounce their ways.

Her eyes fluttered open as she heard her number called on the loudspeaker, immediately catching sight of the old man with his hunched posture. He turned to face her unexpectedly, and, before she could pull away with slight embarrassment from having been caught staring, he winked at her. It was comforting, and she briefly wondered whether or not this was the Turtle Hermit, able to imagine the younger face from the photograph as having aged in such a peaceful way, lacking all of the hatred on his arch-enemy's face.

But that was impossible, she mused as she quickly eyed the blue hair on his scalp. Grandfather Shen had always gloated that the man was bald.


End file.
